A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar

The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice

Caty Borum Chattoo, Lauren Feldman

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520971356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Acomprehensive and insightful examination of the ways comedy can help shape social justice movements."––Hasan Minhaj, Comedian and Host of the Netflix series Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, andinjecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combiningcommunication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedyexamples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The SeriousRole of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work withcomedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.

PART I

Comedy amidst a Contemporary Landscape of Influence and Information

Introduction

“The last thing a comic wants is to be taken seriously. But I can tell you this: You hear people say, “there’s so much suffering in the world—jokes are inappropriate.” I say hunger is inappropriate. Poverty is inappropriate. Lies and hypocrisy from governments, that’s inappropriate.”

Hasan Minhaj, comedian¹

In 2015, weeks after a scathing, viral video exposé of New York City’s bail bond system and its outsized impact on poor, low-level offenders, Mayor Bill de Blasio took action. In a swift move, he took steps to correct an institutional process that Human Rights Watch and other social justice advocates had long maligned.² In a statement echoing the precise arguments made in the video-based muckraking indictment, Mayor de Blasio said: “Money bail is a problem because, as the system currently operates in New York, some people are being detained based on the size of their bank account, not the risk they pose.”³

The source of the media fury that contributed to the mayor’s action? A 17-minute comedy manifesto on a satirical TV news program, viewed millions of times online.

Just one month before the mayor’s history-making announcement, on an episode of HBO’s satirical news show Last Week Tonight, comedian and host John Oliver took on the bail issue with his trademark eye-popping fervor as an outraged, bemused social justice advocate. Oliver alternated between silly (“Jail can do for your actual life what being in a marching band can do for your social life. Even if you’re just in for a little while, it can destroy you.”)⁴ and serious (“Increasingly, bail has become a way to lock up the poor, regardless of guilt”).⁵ Millions of YouTube views and social media shares later, amplified by attention from media outlets including Salon,⁶ the Washington Post,⁷ Reddit, and others, New York City officials changed the city’s bail protocol, immediately impacting thousands of poor and low-level offenders in the short term, and many more in the long run.⁸

Was this a home run for comedy? Is comedy a promising way to meaningfully engage audiences and policy decision-makers on pressing social justice issues? Perhaps. But perhaps it’s not so simple.

Consider another story: A few years into the social media era, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to try a new approach to a public health marketing campaign. Rather than imploring the American public to follow typically somber instructions to prepare for a looming natural or human-caused disaster, the agency’s strategists launched a humorous campaign, “The Zombie Apocalypse.” The effort focused heavily on social media engagement with funny messages, relying on the metaphorical connection between a real-life disaster and an apocalyptic zombie attack.⁹

Researchers concluded that the public health campaign was an attention-grabbing, social-media-sharing success: Thanks to its social media strategy, more than 5 million people engaged directly with the campaign.¹⁰ However, the researchers also revealed a distinct juxtaposition. In a deeper analysis, looking beyond the metrics of reach, the research team found that people exposed to the comedic zombie risk messages, relative to more serious risk messages, were significantly less likely to take protective actions in the face of an impending disaster.¹¹ Behavior change, at least in this instance, was too high a bar for comedy to reach.

The two stories illustrate the promise and paradox—and complexity—of contemporary comedy in service of serious social challenges. On the one hand, perhaps it’s not revelatory to claim, based on anecdotes alone, that comedy can cut through the clutter of today’s unrelenting digital supply of information. In the midst of a niche-driven media environment short on the shared cultural watercooler moments of the analog age, comedy’s ability to pick up viral steam is invaluable. Comedy has the potential to preach beyond the choir, even as it also often mobilizes a base of like-minded thinkers. Comedy may even be able to help set a media agenda in ways that impact policy, as illustrated in the bail story. On the other hand, to ascribe monolithic, one-size-fits-all characteristics onto comedy—and its ability to contribute to social change—risks possible backfiring. Comedy comes in distinct forms, it is often culturally specific, and its appeal for communicating serious issues depends on many factors, not least of which are the roles of the audience and the issue itself. The construct of “social change” in the context of comedy and media also is not monolithic; instead, it exists on a practical level as a continuum that includes building public awareness, shaping individual attitudes and behaviors, shifting social norms and practices, encouraging public engagement, setting a media agenda, and influencing policy.

LOCATING CONTEMPORARY MEDIATED COMEDY IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

The twenty-first century finds us within a dramatic transformation in information, entertainment, and technology—and, simultaneously, an era of social justice activism augmented by digital advocacy. Thanks to a confluence of factors, comedy may be in the midst of its newest golden era of experimentation and influence, both in the United States and around the world. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, a revolutionary transformation in entertainment media business practices and technology, alongside a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions,¹² comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges, such as global poverty, immigrant rights, gender equality, and climate change, to name only a few. Simultaneously, the post-9 / 11 sociocultural moment is characterized by renewed demands for social justice and equity, exemplified by social movements such as the Movement for Black Lives and #MeToo. Both the activism and cultural expression empowered by digital media converge to position comedy as a source of influence on today’s social justice issues.

With the growth of entertainment in the streaming era, mediated comedy is finding new outlets beyond traditional gatekeepers, and the present-day entertainment marketplace is embracing and reflecting new voices and cultural identities. As a result, the digital media landscape has witnessed a surge of comedy. The contemporary mediated comedy menu includes an array of genres—some legacy, established forms, and some that emerged in the digital era—including satirical news, long-form sketch programs, scripted TV sitcoms, streaming comedy stand-up specials, short-form online videos destined for viral spread, documentary storytelling, and podcasts. The present-day U. S. comedy ecology includes a heavy dose of social-issue consciousness: through overt social justice commentary and topics in commercially successful comedy entertainment on legacy TV like NBC, HBO, Showtime, and Comedy Central; through new voices and audacious reflections on social justice issues on risk-taking streaming networks like Netflix and Amazon; through a rise in YouTube-enabled comedy; and through comedy producers like Funny or Die.

We position digital-era mediated comedy as a powerful influencer in contemporary social justice issues based on several specific ideas:

The entertainment marketplace for contemporary mediated comedy is embracing humor that includes social justice challenges. From a media industry perspective, mediated comedy’s current moment is characterized by upheavals in economics, production, distribution, and consumption. The digital entertainment ecosystem is dominated by the upstarts—including Netflix and other streaming outlets—that have the power to shape and demonstrate a massive audience marketplace for diverse comedic voices that overtly take on social justice issues. Amanda Lotz articulated the authoritative cultural power asserted by the new streaming, niche-dominated TV environment, coining the term “phenomenal television” to describe “a particular category of programming that retains the cultural importance attributed to television’s earlier operation as a cultural forum despite the changes of the post-network era” that limit its reach to a narrowcast audience.¹³ Phenomenal television—new watercooler-moment entertainment—is characterized by its ability to cut through media clutter and reach incongruous, or unexpected, audiences due to its resonance with particular themes and discourses circulating in the culture and its attention to issues of social importance.¹⁴ This is a useful characterization for our own articulation of comedy and social justice. Phenomenal TV projects may naturally tend to incorporate social justice topics because of their attention to matters of contemporary cultural, civic importance.

TV comedy sketch programs that skewer social issues such as race, gender politics, and class include the long-running Saturday Night Live, which reasserts its cultural legacy with each decade. Among other notable examples, legacy TV network ABC memorably portrayed the historic wedding of a gay couple, Mitch and Cam, on its hit sitcom Modern Family. Streaming networks like Amazon Studios have welcomed new voices and social-issue perspectives through scripted episodic programming like Transparent. Netflix has become a home for on-demand stand-up comedy specials; for example, its culturally acclaimed, Peabody Award–winning 2017 hit, Homecoming King, featured comedian Hasan Minhaj talking about his experiences of racism as an Indian American immigrant in the United States.¹⁵ TV is not the sole domain of comedy that embraces social justice topics, however. Podcasts and online sites, like Funny or Die, are also influential sources.

As a far-reaching projector of cultural values and narratives, contemporary mediated comedy can serve as a site of cultural resistance. Comedy’s prominent role and popularity in the dominant system of popular culture—the shared location where “we absorb the majority of our beliefs, ideologies, and cultural narratives”¹⁶—provides its central position of influence. Comedy is watched, shared, and discussed by millions of people in the digital age. Such reach matters, given that popular culture and the industrial production of entertainment is “the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured.”¹⁷ Dominant shared norms are fluid, and popular culture both reflects and shapes societal values and beliefs.¹⁸

For its part, contemporary mediated comedy—positioned prominently in the current entertainment marketplace through both reconfigured post-network TV¹⁹ and the digital-native environment of YouTube and Funny or Die—is an engine for new ways of seeing, or an arena of resistance. The contemporary TV landscape, a dominant—but not the sole—domain for mediated comedy viewing, thus operates as a cultural institution and a cultural industry, “as a social conduit that participates in communicating values and ideas within a culture ...